Software and mobile applications are equally as important to conservation technology as the hardware used in the field. Increasingly developed specifically for #tech4wildlife needs, there are mobile apps and software options designed to help with protected area management, wildlife crime reporting, and anti-poaching patrol planning, data analysis, community science, data visualization and GIS mapping, outreach and engagement, and even conservation storytelling.
Likewise, mobile games have opened up new avenues for engaging the public in conservation efforts, allowing for immersive storytelling and interactive experiences. By combining cutting-edge technology and important conservation information with a media form already familiar to the public, conservationists are finding exciting ways to make audiences feel personally invested in critical species and habitats.
Whether you're looking for software and mobile app developers to help you with your own conservation tech needs, you have questions about development, you're looking for resources, or you'd like to share your own app, software, or gaming tools, this is the group for you!
Header photo: Trevor Hebert
WILDLABS & Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)
I hold a PhD in Biological Sciences and specialize in bioacoustics and passive acoustic monitoring of cetaceans in the Argentine Sea and Antarctica. Recently, I've also embraced computing to leverage technology in enhancing our conservation efforts.
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- 2 Discussions
- 14 Groups
- @Adrien_Pajot
- | He/His
WILDLABS & Fauna & Flora
Hi! I am Adrien, a dedicated French ornithologist and engineer committed to biodiversity conservation. I joined the WILDLABS team as a project manager in October 2023!
- 13 Resources
- 55 Discussions
- 3 Groups
- @stefan_istrate
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Machine Learning Researcher & Nature Photographer. Building conservation tech for biodiversity monitoring at Wildlife Insights.
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- 9 Groups
Sustainability Manager for CERES Tag LTD. An animal health company; animal monitoring, conservation, & anti-poaching/ rural crime. Wildlife, livestock, equine & companion. #CeresTrace #CeresWild #CeresRanch
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- 19 Discussions
- 24 Groups
- @tkswanson
- | she/her
San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance
Research Coordinator II for the Conservation Technology Lab at SDZWA
- 2 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 7 Groups
PhD Candidate at University College London. Research and develop wireless sensor networks for biodiversity monitoring. Currently working on a software package for AI bioacoustics classifiers on edge device.
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- 2 Discussions
- 9 Groups
Saint Louis Zoo
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- @irood
- | She/her
Earthmover
I'm the chief of staff at Earthmover, a software company making it easier to work with earth system data
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- 1 Discussions
- 3 Groups
- @MattyD797
- | He/Him
PhD Student | Cornell University | Smithsonian Institution; My focus is in computational ecology within fishery acoustics
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- 10 Discussions
- 12 Groups
Sea Mammal Research Unit Univ' St Andrews
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- @PshemekZ
- | he/him/his
IT + nature
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The authors of this article analyze the use of The Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART) as a Law Enforcement Monitoring tool deployed in The Royal Manas National Park. The tool serves as a holistic approach to...
29 October 2021
The Conservation Technology Award is now seeking applicants! This award will provide two grants, each in the amount of $15,000 USD, to organizations that are deploying technology to advance their work in conservation....
4 May 2021
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) invites proposals for qualified contractors to gather requirements for, and develop a prototype of, a collaborative platform aimed to connect funders with sustainable investment...
5 April 2021
Based on one of the largest camera trap surveys ever attemped, Internet of Elephants' new mobile game Unseen Empire draws on the real field experiences and camera trap data sets of a single decade-long survey, giving...
8 March 2021
Read our new interview with Diogo Veríssimo, Director of Conservation Marketing at On the Edge Conservation! We'll discuss the importance of unique career paths into the conservation tech world, the need for...
1 February 2021
This month, WILDLABS member Drew Cronin shared the new paper "Empowering rangers through technology and innovation." This collaborative effort included several members of the WILDLABS community and leadership, and...
27 January 2021
As we launch our new Sustainable Fishing Challenges group in the WILDLABS community, we are excited to welcome Daniel Steadman, the group manager, to give us an overview of three major areas in which #tech4wildlife...
4 December 2020
Helping people engage with conservation in an easy, effective, and rewarding way is more important than ever, and the upcoming Key Conservation app aims to bring conservation directly to supporters around the world! By...
14 October 2020
UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre seeks an intern to contribute to the mapping of nature’s contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals. This position will have the opportunity to work...
13 October 2020
Funding
Protecting elephants from conservation's most pressing issues like poaching and human-wildlife conflict requires big, bold, and innovative solutions. Hackster.io, Smart Parks, Edge Impulse, Microsoft, and several other...
11 August 2020
As we launch our new Sustainable Fishing Challenges group in the WILDLABS community, we are excited to welcome Daniel Steadman, the group manager, to give us an overview of three major areas in which #tech4wildlife...
4 August 2020
This exciting news article about The Global Wetland Project's FishID platform discusses the latest improvements and developments in using deep learning to identify individual fish species underwater. In addition to...
28 July 2020
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40 Products
Recently updated products
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Hi Stephanie, Thanks for the link I hadn't seen it. It's very usefull. i realise I have listed a list of points without specific questions, here are a few: Do... |
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Software and Mobile Apps | 4 years 8 months ago | |
Lots of good ideas and advice from everyone. Time/money/quality/speed/etc tradeoffs, as always. Start with your minimum viable product, get it out there (at least to your... |
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Software and Mobile Apps | 4 years 9 months ago | |
Monitoring and protecting vast protected areas and wildlife with limited resources and small teams is a huge challenge in Brazil and in... |
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Software and Mobile Apps | 4 years 10 months ago | |
For any projects or programs that involve community engagement and require robust data collection, Havuta has developed an app that helps... |
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Software and Mobile Apps | 4 years 10 months ago | |
Hello Wild Labs Community! I'm seeking advice on designing a generic database for wildlife enforcement. A big issue I... |
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Software and Mobile Apps | 4 years 11 months ago | |
https://github.com/LoRaTracker/GPSTutorial/tree/master/GPS%20performance%20comparisons I'm a bit late to this conversation, but in case anyone else is searching "gps... |
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Software and Mobile Apps | 4 years 11 months ago | |
Hi Jenny, Interesting problem. I don't have direct experience, but it looks like there are some experts you can probably reach out to and ask... if you haven't... |
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Software and Mobile Apps | 4 years 11 months ago | |
The Knowledge Transfer Network helps businesses get the best out of creativity, ideas and the latest discoveries, to strengthen the UK... |
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Software and Mobile Apps | 4 years 11 months ago | |
The American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC) has released an open source tool to assist... |
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Software and Mobile Apps | 4 years 11 months ago | |
HI Robert, I have so many thoughts about this topic.. will try to keep them brief! It's definitely a discussion topic I'd like to throw around in the virtual... |
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Software and Mobile Apps | 5 years 1 month ago | |
Hi Everyone, I am a technology professional with years of experience managing large scale software development projects. I... |
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Software and Mobile Apps | 5 years 3 months ago | |
Hi Everyone, I am a technology professional with years of experience managing large scale software development projects. I... |
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Software and Mobile Apps | 5 years 3 months ago |
How do you access the internet remotely?
24 July 2017 5:29pm
12 January 2024 1:32pm
My solution is usually wayyyy more traditional and involves climbing the tallest tree or hiking the highest hill.
That being said, I cant find a clear explanation about how BRCK works and I assumed it used signal repeater, which is illegal in many countries. It is also very prone of lightning strike, which is the reason I did not use it as I live in a very lightning-prone area.
12 January 2024 2:08pm
Trying to make sense of this brick product, the link provided is a bit vague. The front page talks about SIP trunking, so that implies it's all about telephone connectivity. And hence not related to the internet itself. Surely that means you have to already have an Internet connection? If that is the case, would not whatsapp voice calls be just as useful and a lot easier ? I've re-read it a few times and it does not seem to be any product relating to providing remote Internet connectivity??? Seems more like a way to extend your telephone network to a remote one for a business.
Presentation opportunity: Text analysis for conservation (NACCB 2024)
8 January 2024 4:05pm
Assessing the biodiversity impact of palm oil facilities around the world
4 January 2024 12:07pm
Update on SEE Shell App to identify illegal tortoiseshell products
14 December 2023 10:00pm
Data Viz Inspo for the Holidays
11 December 2023 8:42pm
Automatic extraction of temperature/moon phase from camera trap video
29 November 2023 1:15pm
1 December 2023 2:35pm
Hi Lucy
As others have mentioned, camera trap temperature readouts are inaccurate, and you have the additional problem that the camera's temperature can rise 10C if the sun shines on it.
I would also agree with the suggestion of getting the moon phase data off the internet.
1 December 2023 2:38pm
Do you need to do this for just one project? And do you use the same camera make/model for every deployment? Or at least a finite number of camera makes/models? If the number of camera makes/models you need to worry about is finite, even if it's large, I wouldn't try to solve this for the general case, I would just hard-code the pixel ranges where the temperature/moon information appears in each camera model, so you can crop out the relevant pixels without any fancy processing. From there it won't be trivial, exactly, but you won't need AI.
You may need separate pixel ranges for night/day images for each camera; I've seen cameras that capture video with different aspect ratios at night/day (or, more specifically, different aspect ratios for with-flash and no-flash images). If you need to determine whether an image is grayscale/color (i.e., flash/no-flash), I have a simple heuristic function for this that works pretty well.
Assuming you can manually define the relevant pixel ranges, which should just take a few minutes if it's less than a few dozen camera models, I would extract the first frame of each video to an image, then crop out the temperature/moon pixels.
Once you've cropped out the temperature/moon information, for the temperature, I would recommend using PyTesseract (an OCR library) to read the characters. For the moon information... I would either have a small library of images for all the possible moon phases for each model, and match new images against those, or maybe - depending on the exact style they use - you could just, e.g., count the total number of white/dark pixels in that cropped moon image, and have a table that maps "percentage of white pixels" to a moon phase. For all the cameras I've seen with a moon phase icon, this would work fine, and would be less work than a template matching approach.
FYI I recently wrote a function to do datetime extraction from camera trap images (it would work for video frames too), but there I was trying to handle the general case where I couldn't hard-code a pixel range. That task was both easier and harder than what you're doing here: harder because I was trying to make it work for future, unknown cameras, but easier because datetimes are relatively predictable strings, so you know when you find one, compared to, e.g., moon phase icons.
In fact maybe - as others have suggested - extracting the moon phase from pixels is unnecessary if you can extract datetimes (either from pixels or from metadata, if your metadata is reliable).
5 December 2023 10:09pm
camtrapR has a function that does what you want. i have not used it myself but it seems straightforward to use and it can run across directories of images:
https://jniedballa.github.io/camtrapR/reference/OCRdataFields.html
Data integration platforms
28 March 2019 9:27am
20 November 2023 8:19pm
Hey Chris - you haven't missed Variety Hour! It's this week!
1 December 2023 8:56pm
Argos has an API
Iridium data either arrives via email/server IP
Globalstar (unknown)
If you'd like the web services document for Argos, shoot me an email (tgray at woodsholegroup - dotcom).
1 December 2023 8:56pm
(duplicate)
ICOTEQ launch TAGRANGER® system of products
23 November 2023 1:25pm
Firetail - Black Friday
Software Engineer at Rainforest Connection & Arbimon
14 November 2023 12:30am
Insight; a secure online platform designed for sharing experiences of conservation tool use.
7 November 2023 1:01pm
A secure platform designed for those working to monitor & protect natural resources. Insight facilitates sharing experience, knowledge & tools to increase efficiency & effectiveness in conservation. By sharing we reduce time & money spent to find, test, & implement solutions.
TWS2023 - get in touch
5 November 2023 8:13pm
5 November 2023 9:04pm
I'm registered with the TWS2023 app, so feel free to nudge me there as well
Payment for ecosystem services - mobile money case study?
27 October 2023 2:59pm
30 October 2023 10:23am
Huge thank you Carly!
3 November 2023 12:36pm
The folks at AB Entheos in Nairobi are also looking at wild life damage insurance https://ab-entheos.co.ke/
5 November 2023 4:09pm
Thanks Arky!
DeepFaune: a software for AI-based identification of mammals in camera-trap pictures and videos
14 July 2023 3:14pm
24 October 2023 8:46pm
Hello to all, new to this group. This is very exciting technology. can it work for ID of individual animals? we are interested in Ai for identifying individual jaguars (spots) and andean Bears (face characteristics). Any recommendation? contact? thanks!
German
25 October 2023 8:57am
That's a very interesting question and use case (I'm not from deepfaune). I'm playing with this at the moment and intend to integrate it into my other security software that can capture and send video alerts. I should have this working within a few weeks I think.
The structure of that software is that it is two stage, the first stage identifies that there is an animal and it's bounding box and then there's a classification stage. I intend to merge the two stages so that it behaves like a yolo model so that the output is bounding boxes as well as what type of animal it is.
However, my security software can cascade models. So if you were able to train a single stage classifier that identifies your particular bears, then you could cascade all of these models in my software to generate an alert with a video saying which bear it was.
4 November 2023 4:51am
Hi @GermanFore ,
I work with the BearID Project on individual identification of brown bears from faces. More recently we worked on face detection across all bear species and ran some tests with identifying Andean bears. You can find details in the paper I linked below. We plan to do more work with Andean bears in 2024.
I would love to connect with you. I'll send you a message with my email address.
Regards,
Ed
Restoring the Mara Elephant Population Using Coexistence Tech Solutions with Mara Elephant Project's Wilson Sairowua
20 October 2023 1:31pm
Biodiversity Intactness dataset now available on the Earth Engine community catalog
16 October 2023 1:21pm
Mozilla Foundation, funding for nature conservation
4 October 2023 6:30pm
Co-Founder & CTO (Chief Technology Officer)
4 October 2023 4:00pm
Software for recording field data?
6 September 2023 3:01pm
22 September 2023 11:08am
Have a look at kobocollect, very easy to use and reliable, can collect data and then send them to the cloud when you have internet.
Other solution:
QField - Efficient field work built for QGIS
SMART Conservation Software - Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (smartconservationtools.org)
EarthRanger: Protecting Wildlife With Real-Time Data
22 September 2023 4:05pm
I second Kobo/CyberTracker for tracks, but if you have money for an ArcGIS Online license, Survey123 is great (offline use - but can't record tracks)
22 September 2023 6:11pm
We use Kobo as well - it is amazing!!!
Gundi: The Universal Adaptor for Conservation Technologies
13 September 2023 4:28pm
CIEEM 2023 Autumn Conference: Modernising Ecology: Techniques and Approaches
5 September 2023 1:59pm
Intro to Systematic Conservation Planning with Marxan
5 September 2023 1:18pm
How to report on biodiversity impacts at scale for TNFD
24 August 2023 12:41pm
Conservation Systems Developer
24 August 2023 11:13am
Mobile App. Developer / Gibbon Research
24 August 2023 9:59am
MoveApps: A Digital Home for Tracking Data Analysis
17 August 2023 7:47pm
Firetail 11 - GPS and sensor analysis
18 July 2023 5:04pm
11 August 2023 12:15am
Hi Tobias!
This sounds great and I am looking forward to trying it out after returning from field work!
Very cool with the Vectronic Activity data! I am looking forward to check How we can use that!
Cheers,
Lars
19 December 2023 7:45am
Wow! Those Yeti things are just what are needed for the wild passage project: